links for 2007-12-20

links for 2007-12-14

links for 2007-12-13

links for 2007-12-11

Christmas fun

I received this e-mail from a neighbor. It's one of those things where you read their answers, then fill in your own and pass it on to the people you'd like to hear back from. Seeing as how while most of you will be getting ready for work or what-have-you this morning while I'm undergoing prep for surgery to get "unscrewed", I won't be in much of a blogging mood, and thought I'd leave this here for you to enjoy. Please feel free to leave your own answers in the comments, or post to your own blog and link to it in the comments. Merry Christmas! Welcome to the 2007 Holiday Edition of Getting to Know Your Friends! You know the drill. Don't be a scrooge! Fill it out, pass it on, blah blah blah. I would love to hear your answers. 1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? This time of year, I have to go with the nog. I can get hot chocolate any time. 2. Does Santa wrap the presents or just sit them under the tree? Growing up, Santa just left stuff under the tree, or on the coach next to the tree, etc. Since then, he seems to have upgraded his process, as the gifts he leaves are now wrapped. 3. Colored or white lights? I prefer white, though I do enjoy the colored lights when they're done well. 4. Do you hang mistletoe? Nope. I'm already kissing the person I want to kiss the most. 5. When do you put your decorations up? We have no hard and fast rules on this one. The tree just went up this weekend, and the lights were put on last night. 6. What is your favorite holiday dish? Can I go with the nog again? 7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child? The older gentlemen, Mr. Gridley, who lived next door to my grandparents, would dress as Santa and come over to hand out our presents when we did Christmas at their house. As a child, having Santa right there, handing you the presents he'd brought all the way from the North Pole? Incredible. 8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? I'd have to check with my folks, but it was likely somewhere around ten or eleven years of age. I overheard some other boys talking about, and I confronted my parents with the information. They told me the truth, but swore me to secrecy, as my sister, five years younger than I, still believed. 9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? That usually depends on where we might be, but generally, yes. 10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree? White lights, with ornaments from my childhood, plus some that were gifts from my mother-in-law, my mom, and my grandmothers. They're pretty much all personal momentos of one sort or another. No tinsel or garland. Pretty simple, the way we like it. 11. Snow: Love it or hate it? Love it, just because, growing up in south Louisiana, and now living in north Texas, we don't see snow often. 12. Can you ice skate? Nope. Heck, I barely remember how to roller skate! 13. Do you remember your favorite gift? So many were favorites at so many different times of my life, I really couldn't say. 14. What's the most important thing about the holidays for you? Spending time with the family. It's great to see Christmas through the eyes of a child--my son--once again. 15. What is your favorite holiday dessert? A tie between my grandmother's chocolate pie, and my grandmother's lemon pie. The tie is always broken by having a slice of each. 16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? Watching my son open his presents on Christmas morning. 17. What is on top of your tree? An angel. 18. Which do you like best giving or receiving? Definitely the giving, though I won't lie and say the receiving--especially when it's something from my carefully assembled wish list--comes in a close second. Hey, at least I'm honest. 19. What is your favorite Christmas song? I'm a sucker for a well done "What Child is This?", and I also love "Joy To The World" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing". 20. Do you like candy canes? To eat? Not really, but I don't mind them otherwise. 21. What is your favorite Christmas movie? Technically not a movie, but I love "A Charlie Brown Christmas"

links for 2007-12-09

links for 2007-12-08

links for 2007-12-07

Born to it

Monday night, my folks made the requisite birthday phone call, and while chatting with my dad, I was informed that thirty-seven years ago today, I witnessed my first LSU football game. Not that I recall one lick of it, you understand, being all of two days old. But Dad held me and we watched LSU go at it against Ole Miss, which was quarterbacked by the legendary Archie Manning. Of the three games Archie played against the Tigers, this was the only one he lost, and the Rebels lost big, 61-17. Manning played the game with a protected broken arm. (They don't make football players like they use to, though some come close.) So for my friends who might not quite understand my passion for college football, especially the Tigers, you could say I was born to it, and it's been with me ever since. GEAUX TIGERS!!

links for 2007-12-05

  • R2D2 Translator
    Type in the word of phrase you want to hear in R2's distinctive chirps and whistles, and you're delivered the corresponding audio.
    (tags: fun StarWars)
  • 40Hz - 40Hz
    Newton software resource. Will come in handy for my "new" eMate and my resurrected MessagePad 2100.
    (tags: Newton software)

2007 College Football Bowl Schedule

In some cultures, it is customary for the one having a birthday, instead of receiving gifts, to give them to loved ones and friends. Since I'm unemployed and living off of the labor of the hot number who agreed to swim through life with me, my gift to my college football-loving friends is a ready-made, iCalendar format calendar for the 2007 College Football Bowl season. From the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl (there's a mouthful) on December 20th through the Allstate BCS Championship Game (Geaux Tigers!) on January 8th, they're all in there, complete with locations, the match-ups, and the station on which you can find the game, courtesy of ESPN. All times are for the Central time zone. Just click on the link below, unzip the file, and open it in your calendar application of choice. (Provided said calendar application supports the iCalendar protocol. This was created in Apple's iCal, so if you're a Mac OS X user, you're covered.) Enjoy!


The operative part of the acronym is "No"

The third time was not the charm for me, at least as it it pertains to National Novel Writing Month. I started out pretty good, keeping my word count around the daily average, for the first five days. Then I became ill. Nothing serious, just a massive head cold, with a sinus infection chaser. Persistent cough from the drainage. That led to the onset of bronchitis. All of this kept me up most of the night on Wednesday/early Thursday of the 7th and 8th. It really sucked away a lot of my motivation, because I was just so tired all the freaking time. Then I began making excuses to not write during times when I wasn't tired. Like deciding the afternoon of Friday the 9th that now was a good time to begin a massive purge of all magazines in my study. (Anything more than a year old, with some notable exceptions, went to the recycle bin.) I do have more legroom under my desk now, so one could rationalize that this actually assists in the writing process. Yeah, that sounds good. In the end, though, I excused myself right out of getting anywhere past 6,000 words. It's December 1st, and I'm still not 100%, but I'm well enough that I should be writing, writing, writing. And I will. Because writers write. I have some great ideas regarding this novel I started, and the overall plot is pretty well laid out in my head. (This is a rarirty for me, as nearly all of the novels I've begun, NaNoWriMo-related or not, have hardly ever been fully-formed, at least in terms of a basic plot.) I'm going to keep at this one. It may turn in to the sort of project Jason Snell undertook, where instead of starting a new novel for this year's NaNoWriMo, he added 50,000 words to one he already had underway. We'll see.

I was wrong. It's worse than I thought.

Some chatter by the sports media talking heads got me to wondering, so I did some research. I was wrong when I stated that a team had to win their conference to play in the BCS national championship game, thus eliminating Georgia and Kansas from contention. According to the BCS Selection Policies and Procedures, the only requirements to play in the National Championship Game (NCG) is that the two teams must be ranked first and second in the BCS rankings. What this means is that if the unlikely scenario I posited comes true, and Missouri, West Virginia, and Virginia Tech all lose, what we'd likely see is Ohio State and Georgia playing for the BCS championship. That's right, one team that played its last game on 11/17, and the other on 11/24, each getting to play for the national title, and only one of whom won its conference. If that scenario isn't just one of many which continues to scream the need for a playoff system, I don't know what would be one. What this means is that if somehow Mizzo, WV, and VT all lose--and things are tied up between BC and VT as of this writing--and LSU prevails, the pollsters would have to give my Tigers some serious love to vault them past Georgia and Kansas to put them in the national championship game. Otherwise, the best they can hope for is the Sugar Bowl. Given how badly they played last week against Arkansas, and the way they've struggled all through November, that may just be the best they should get any way. Geaux Tigers!!!

links for 2007-12-01

links for 2007-11-30

American Veteran Removes US Flag from Beneath Mexican Flag



links for 2007-11-29

Wave of Sorrow

Originally slated for inclusion on the Joshua Tree album twenty years ago, this song remained unfinished until just recently:

It can now be found on disc two of the 20th anniversary edition of Joshua Tree. [Wave of the phin to the Fontosaurus.]

I Am Confusion

Last night (this morning?), I finished reading I Am Legend. Well, re-reading would be more of an accurate statement. And yet... This is the I Am Legend I recall from many years before, and at the same time, it's not the I Am Legend I recall from many years before. For clarification, I have not seen The Last Man on Earth or The Omega Man, but I'm beginning to wonder if maybe I've read some homage to Matheson's original work. Here's some of what I recall, in the hopes that a reader can point me to the story I remember: (Oh, and if you haven't read I Am Legend and you plan to go see the Will Smith movie, there are some potential plot spoilers ahead, so you may want to stop reading now, since it's likely you cannot help me anyway. Thanks for stopping by, though!) + as in the book, the story I remember takes place in Los Angeles, only the Neville character is living in a house on a hill, and has an actual moat in front of the place, so deep the vampires can't cross it. I want to say he even bulldozed the dead vampire bodies in to the moat. + I recall the story mentioning the vampires having blue tattoos. + the story was obviously more recent than Matheson's, since it has the Neville character watching a video of a plague victim, the Ben Cortman character, actually becoming one of the vampire creatures. + the Neville character has a dog that goes around with him, as we've seen in the trailers of the Will Smith movie adaptation, as opposed to the dog Neville tries to befriend in the book, but which ends up attacked by the vampires. + the Neville character, while foraging/hunting in the city, is trapped by a snare attached to a light pole. He spends a lot of time trying to get free, so much so that the sun begins to set, and vampire dogs come out. The Neville character's dog defends him while he frees himself, and is mortally wounded. This also looks like it will be in the Will Smith movie, and seeing this split-second snare bit in the trailer is one of the memories that jostled me to re-read Matheson's book. + the Neville character goes to a park to wait for any survivors who might still be alive; he leaves signs tacked up all over the city with the when and where. + the Neville character discovers a female survivor, very much like Ruth in Matheson's book; except in this story, instead of hitting him with a mallet, she drugs him after learning how to turn off/undo all of his house's defense mechanisms, letting the vampires in. + the Neville character is taken by the vampires to their underground lair, a miniature city below the real city, where he is somewhat put on display, and some of the vampires feed off of him. The Ruth character has a son or little brother, and the Neville character feels somewhat sorry for them, wants to help them, etc. + the Ruth character, and maybe others, help him escape, and they leave the city by a sailboat. That's the stuff I remember, and that stuff is not in the Matheson book. So where did I read it? I've spent a couple of hours searching the Internet for answers, all to no avail. Perhaps my Google fu isn't strong enough. Perhaps I just don't know what I should be searching for. But I know I've read this story as I've described above. Help me, scifi/horror readers. You're my only hope.

I would love to witness a conversation like this

Another nugget from Sheriff Bell:

Here a year or two back me and Loretta went to a conference in Corpus Christi and I got set next to this woman, she was the wife of somebody or other. And she kept talkin about the right wing this and the right wing that. I aint even sure what she meant by it. The people I know are mostly just common people. Common as dirt, as the sayin goes. I told her that and she looked at me funny. She thought I was sayin somethin bad about em, but of course that's a high compliment in my part of the world. She kept on, kept on. Finally told me, said: I dont like the way the country is headed. I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion. And I said well mam I dont think you got any worries about the way the country is headed. The way I see it goin I dont have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.